The essay reviews references to Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy in the work of Helmuth Plessner. First discussed is the Krisis der transzendentalen Wahrheit im Anfang, in which Plessner effects a critique of the transcendental method and shows that overcoming its crisis requires philosophy to rigorously restrict the applicability of theory to the experimental sphere and put it up for judgment by the tribunal of practical reason. Next under scrutiny is Plessner’s programmatic text in philosophical anthropology, in which he strives to employ Kant’s deductive method for the construction of his own system of organic forms.

The objective of the article is to present Hans Kelsen’s basic norm concept that allows the combination of the two relevant dimensions in relation to juridical science, namely the positivity and validity of law. The role of the concept of basic norm is presented by the author of the Reine Rechtslehre with reference to Kant (read through the works by H. Cohen) as a concept enabling formulation of an answer to the question “To what extent is it possible to interpret certain facts as objectively valid legal norms?” The epistemological problem of the object of cognition of juridical science is connected with the issue of normativity. According to Kelsen, only the assumption of a certain nonpositive hypothetical norm regulating the legislation of norms of a given system enables normative interpretation of certain facts. The basic norm authorizes the way of issuing norms, yet not their content. The structure of the legal order creates a hierarchical system in which the higher category norms delegate the law-making power to create the lower category norms. The legal system creates a dynamic system of norms.

The paper considers two—in author’s belief fundamental—approaches to apriority, which he proposes to call “absolute” and “relative.” The first was most fully expressed by Immanuel Kant, the second by Ludwig Wittgenstein. In author’s opinion, both derive from empiricist philosophy in its modern form. The concept of experience which is characteristic of modern empiricism forces acceptance of certain experienceindependent (a priori) assumptions, thanks to which only experience can provide information about objects. Depending on whether we regard these assumptions as independent of all experience or only from a specific context and reference frame and empirical in other contexts, we receive respectively absolute and relative apriority. The author attempts to prove that relative apriority is the continuation, generalisation and radicalisation of the absolute variant.

The text considers the possibility of studying the Freudian psychoanalysis as a certain form of transcendentalism. In particular, it analyses the relation of Freud’sproposition concerning the strangeness within the subject—a strangeness called unconsciousness—to Kant’s claim about the necessity of the synthetic unity ofapperception. The study commences with Ricoeur’s reading of Freud’s teachings in order to demonstrate how, by introducing the language of transcendental philosophy into the reading of Freud’s works, Ricoeur omits the issue of the subjective conditions for the constitution of any possible meaning. Next, searching for the possibility to formulate these conditions on the grounds of Freudian psychoanalysis, the text investigates relevant Heidegger’s reading of Kant. It finds in it the model justification for such understanding of the unity of “I think” which makes it, already at its core, conditioned by diversity identified with temporality. By attempting to grasp the contradiction between such a temporal condition for subjectivity and Freud’s postulate on the timeless nature of unconsciousness, the text applies Derrida’s criticism of the metaphysical conception of time, which is directed exactly at Heidegger’s metaphysics of Dasein. In consequence, it turns out that a profound justification seems to exist for the seemingly paradoxical Freudian statement about unconsciousness as linked with, on the one hand, the most primal intuitions still grounded in animism, and on the other, with a continuation of Kant’s teachings.

Following Ricoeur and referring to some contemporary phenomenological studies I demonstrate—perhaps differently than others do—that Husserl’s phenomenological undertaking has also hermeneutic aspects. With Husserl, we are in a meaningful world which reveals its sense in intentional acts. The interpretation of senses can be treated as experiencing them. In particular, I examine the peculiar hermeneutics of affectiveness and sensation, i.e. the hermeneutics that is broadly understood as a project of demonstrating the origin of meaning. This project reaches the difference founding all the articulations of meaning rather than some aprioric basis of understanding. The difference is a source that flows in experience of sense, even in their mature culturally articulatedforms, which are, however, forever permeated by sensation and the affective.

The paper aims to reconstruct Heidegger’s historical-intentional assumptions in his ontological interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The paper presents young Heidegger’s project of the “metaphysical-teleological interpretation of consciousness.” The project indicates the direction of his further ontological interpretation of transcendentalism: Heidegger stands up to the traditional, well known neo-Kantian interpretation of the Critique, and offers a new conception of ontological knowledge and cognition. According to this conception, cognition is grounded in transcendental imagination where a threefold synthesis takes place. Heidegger’s original temporal interpretation of transcendental schematism is also recalled to stress the significance of his new ontological approach to Kant’s theoretical philosophy.

The article presents the philosophical thought of Rudolf Zocher, Wolfgang Cramer and Hans Wagner, whose theoretical stance can be dubbed Neoneo-Kantianism. The article investigates their philosophical output and argues that they developed a transcendental reflection of a different kind than that of Baden Neo-Kantianism. The transcendental reflection of Neoneo-Kantianism, especially in the work of Hans Wagner, takes on the topic of phenomenological inquiry and treats consciousness as a source of subject- object distinction, unlike Rickert and Windelband, who were developing transcendental reflection focused on aprioristic forms of cognition, much in the post-Fichtean vein, thus giving primacy to the subjective conditions of possible experience.

The paper discusses the philosophy of language and communication based on Immanuel Kant’s transcendental method. Firstly, the basic assumptions of methodical rationalism are presented. Subsequent sections analyse Kant’s intellectual successors: Wilhelm von Humboldt and Ernst Cassirer. Both the intellectuals adopted Kant’s point of views and both treated language as an active, cultural factor participating in the creation of reality. The article ends with a suggestion that the transcendental approach will be present in the 21th-century researches on language and communication.

The article analyses systematically and historically the specific idea of transcendentalism developed in the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism. The unique line of the Marburg’s School interpretation of Kant’s critical philosophy consists in contrasting critical (relational) and dogmatic (substantial) understandings of basic philosophical concepts. This line is characteristic of the Marburg School idealism, and it perfectly grasps Ernst Cassirer’s peculiar understanding of philosophy—as “the critique of knowledge.” The main thesis of this paper is the following one: the critical method understood as the method of searching for fundamental principles and conditions of possibility of objectiveness is a basic tool of analysis and investigations carried out by Cassirer.

The paper presents Husserl’s conception of the relation between science and the living world (Lebenswelt), i.e. the world of everyday experience and communication. In Husserl view, science, or, more precisely, its basic aprioric structure is founded on the primal, essential core of the living world (a priori) from which it obtains its sense. Science (scientific a priori) modifies, idealizes, and mathematizes the primal aprioric Lebenswelt. Due to those operations scientific theories can represent empirical reality.

In his response to the question about the conditions of the possibility of dependable cognition Kant first points to the faculties of the cognitive powers and subsequently lists the criteria and normative foundations of knowledge—a system of forms, concepts and principles. Kant primarily seeks the possibilities of experience-independent cognition, the logical criteria governing the possibility of cognition as such. The paper outlines the creation of the systemic union of the primal concepts and principles of pure reason, which is necessary for the creation of knowledge. In other words, it follows the constitution phases of the cognition system: apperception, experience, self-consciousness and the principles of reason. The principles of reason ultimately give systemic unity to humancognitive powers—and, in effect, the human world of experience and cognition. It is this systemic unity which makes cognition science—or, in other words, pure reason—as it constitutes a specific system and is able to create science understood as the systemic unity of specific fields.